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False school shooting report is the second 'swatting' incident for Barrow this year

Barrow County sheriff’s investigators are still working to track down the person who called in a false report of a school shooting at County Line Elementary School on Tuesday.

Investigators are worried that the prank call, the second maliciously false 911 call that solicited a large-scale response from the sheriff’s office this year, was made by someone who gets a thrill out of seeing police close in on a location.

Law enforcement officers in metro Atlanta have dealt with dozens of these fake 911 calls since last fall, and they’ve started to call the crime “swatting,” named for the prank callers’ goal of getting an agency’s SWAT team to respond.

“I think they sit back and think it’s cute,” Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said. “And it’s certainly not cute given the waste of resources, and it’s certainly not funny or cute when you’re talking about our children, and our administrators and our parents who could be innocent victims to something like this.”

Barrow County didn’t dispatch the SWAT team to County Line Elementary on Tuesday, but deputies did surround the school, north of Winder off Rockwell Church Road.

Someone dialed 911 about 4:30 p.m. from an out-of-town cellphone number and reported that a shooter was at the front entrance of the school spraying the building with bullets, Smith said. Teachers and administrators still were finishing up their workday when the 911 call came in, and several students were in the school’s after-school program.

Within minutes of the 911 call, 10 deputies responded to the school, and fire and EMS units were put on standby, Smith said. The school was locked down as deputies searched for the shooter, or any evidence that he had been there, but they found nothing amiss.

“We have to respond to (these kinds of calls) — that’s the sad thing, and we have to waste a lot of resources to do it,” Smith said. “But when we’re talking about our kids, and our administration at the school, we want to make sure they’re safe.”

Sheriff’s investigators are trying to trace the phone that was used to make the 911 call, but disposable cellphones and Internet-based phone services are making that type of work harder, Smith said.

Investigators have all but given up tracking down the caller who, on Jan. 3, phoned in a false report of father barricading himself inside his Kendall Park home and threatening to hurt himself or his two small children. Authorities swarmed the neighborhood just as residents returned home from work and confronted a confused man who did not know why police were at his door.

The 911 caller knew the family well enough to make the report convincing, but tracing the phone number was a dead end, Smith said.